


loser

by MissingN000



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Friends, Hurt/Comfort, I just love them both so much, M/M, PARKOUR [projects all my self-worth issues onto leon], Pining, i know it’s been done before but consider this [jumps off a cliff], this is another leon coping with his championship loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 06:08:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30101499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissingN000/pseuds/MissingN000
Summary: Leon doesn't know how to lose.
Relationships: Dande | Leon/Kibana | Raihan
Comments: 2
Kudos: 43





	loser

**Author's Note:**

> yo, thanks for reading my fic! it’s finals week, and i pulled an all-nighter writing this. what can i say? i got hit with a wave of inspiration. totally worth it. i love leon so much, you guys. i’m so damn gone.
> 
> happy reading!

It’s only been a week since Leon’s historic loss at the hands of Gloria, and he is completely and utterly falling apart.

The final blow was to Charizard, a _G-Max Stun Shock_ from her Toxtricity that tore the sky in two as if it were paper and poisoned the clouds with neon shades of heliotrope; but the move might as well have hit Leon too, with the way his every synapse failed in a cascade one after another, short-circuiting the roar from the crowd and in his head to an all-consuming silence. 

_I lost?_

The atmosphere was alive with residual electricity, crackling and angry, permeating the air like deep-sea pressure. Charizard was sprawled in an unconscious heap at his feet, wings crumpled over his face in a last attempt to hide his shame. Her Toxtricity, still Gigantamaxed and very much conscious, towered above him like a skyscraper made of pure energy, and for the first time Leon realized just how incredibly small he really was.

_I lost._

And so he tossed his hat into the air like a fallen crown, carefully choreographed smile stretched a little too wide but it still hadn’t reached his eyes. He congratulated her, because at the time he thought he was a good sport, even though the words sounded more like they were coming from the speakers closing in all around them rather than his own lungs. Gloria was beaming, bright as an eclipse right before it reaches totality, and Leon remembered in that moment that you’re not supposed to look at the sun. So he tore his eyes away and ducked his head behind his cape fluttering wildly, and pretended the deafening roar of the crowd ringing in his skull was what made it so hard to see. It was only thanks to years of conditioning that he kept it together in front of the cameras, but he only got through three interviews before the daggers in his chest threatened to poke holes through his ribcage. So he excused himself with grace, the last of it he could muster, and if he ran a little too fast off the field no one said anything about it after. He took a Flying Taxi straight to his flat and he hasn’t left since.

To say he feels like a shell of his former self would be the understatement of the century.

He made the mistake of checking his social media accounts two or three days ago -- yeah, that was a terrible idea. About a third of the comments he saw were from his loyal fans still in shock that he lost, another third said it was about time, and the last third said he had it coming and that he deserved it. _‘I’ve been waiting for years to watch him get knocked off that stupid pedestal,’_ a particularly vicious comment wrote. _‘Only wish I could’ve been there to see that pathetic look on his face in person.’_

Leon’s no stranger to online hate. Comes with the occupation. And normally he’s got nerves of steel, laughs it off nice and easy with a million-watt Champion grin, the vitriol bouncing right off of him like cotton balls off a brick wall. But _this?_ This is different, because he’s never looked at those comments before and actually agreed with them, found himself nodding along every time someone else said he was such a failure. He’d sent the Rotom in his phone off to the PC then spent the whole night hunched over it, eyes glazing over as the artificial glow from his screen numbed his vision, until his phone ran out of power somewhere between 5 and 6AM. He hasn’t charged it since. 

Which explains the situation he’s in now. Someone’s knocking on his door _(come in, please, someone come in and help me)_ and Leon wishes with all his heart that they’d just go away. Each tap against his heavy wooden door reverberates through the channels of his brain, and it’d be hell for his crushing headache if Leon honestly thought it could get any worse.

Then, he hears the front door _open._

“Leon?” a voice calls, and _fuck,_ figures that he’d just let himself in. They’ve been doing that since they were thirteen, and ten years of treating each others’ homes as if they were their own has eroded more than a few boundaries. Somewhere along the line of being rivals they became best friends, and maybe Leon is also a little bit secretly in love with him, but that’s not important right now. 

For a moment, Leon thinks about pretending he’s not home, and just how to pull that off. But that would mean he’d have to do something pathetic like hide under his bed or maybe his closet, and hasn’t Leon’s dignity been through enough lately?

“In here,” he calls instead, throat angrily reminding him that he’s been entirely nonverbal for at least three days if not four. He hasn’t really been keeping track of time lately.

Raihan’s soft footsteps grow louder as he slinks into Leon’s bedroom, propping himself up against the doorframe with that signature slouch of his that makes everything he does look like he’s hardly trying, or like he hardly cares. Leon knows he must look like a wreck, hair messy with a week of bedhead and eyes puffy as his pillows, but if Raihan agrees, he doesn’t show it. An easy, comfortable smile is slipped across his features, like this day is no different from any other time they’ve seen each other at all, and Leon wonders just how long it’ll be until he can smile like that again.

If ever.

“‘Sup, champ?” Raihan says.

Leon levels him a glare as cold as ice and just about as hard as it, too. “Word choice, man.”

Raihan has the audacity to laugh at that, the bastard. Anyone else might think the jab slid off him like water off a Ducklett’s back, but Leon knows better by now. Everything from Raihan’s wiry posture to his half-lidded eyes paint the picture of a man who never takes life too seriously, but Leon’s seen carefree words tossed around that don’t match up with his observant eyes, watching like a Talonflame looking for the slightest ruffle in the grass. It’s like he wants people to underestimate him. Leon’s never been able to figure out why.

Until now.

“Sorry, sorry,” Raihan chuckles. “Force of habit.”

Leon’s not looking forward to him having to break that habit. There are a lot of things he’s not looking forward to getting used to. “What are you doing here?”

“You haven’t left your house in a week.” Raihan scratches at a patch of nascent stubble on his chin. “People are starting to talk.”

Yeah, he knows. “Let ‘em talk,” Leon mumbles.

“I texted you,” Raihan adds.

“My phone is dead,” Leon shoots back.

“For a _week?_ ” Raihan’s brows pinch in disbelief. He’s always been more surgically attached to his phone than Leon is, but Leon still isn’t that much better. Hey, it’s not his fault his generation was raised on smartphones instead of baby formula.

Leon just shrugs in response, vaguely gesturing towards the lifeless brick now upside-down on his nightstand. Raihan drifts into the room with his hands still tucked within his loose front pocket then stops to inspect Leon’s phone as if somehow Leon might’ve been mistaken, as if not checking it for several days meant it wouldn’t be out of power by now anyway. He taps a couple times on the black screen like he’s expecting something to happen, and when it doesn’t, the ghost of a scowl flickers across his features before falling away without a trace. He puts Leon’s phone back on the nightstand and props himself up against the chest of drawers, and Leon muses to himself that Raihan could probably never be within physical range of something without leaning on it. He’s even done it to Leon before. Not for the first time, Leon wonders just how much effort he puts into looking so nonchalant, how much of it is natural and how much of it is just for show. 

Or maybe Leon’s just projecting. Maybe it’s only him who has to act so fake all the time, just to please as many people as possible. Rose made him do it.

 _Arceus,_ he hates that guy.

Raihan looks like he’s trying very hard to think of something to say that would come off as more than just a platitude. “I texted you a couple times, actually,” he admits. “Got kinda worried.”

And that’s how Leon knows this might actually be serious. He could count on one hand with fingers left over the amount of times he’s seen Raihan make a face like that. Leon really doesn’t want to have this conversation right now, but he wants even less for Raihan to leave.

So he settles on, “I lost.”

Raihan rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably. “Yeah.”

There’s a silent, _‘Want to talk about it?’_ in Raihan’s eyes, and the answer is obviously no. But Leon learns that _want to_ and _going to_ are two different things, because the words spill out of his mouth before he can stop them. “People said it was about time,” he mumbles. “That I deserved it.”

“People also said it was the best battle of your career,” Raihan tells him. “It was exhilarating. Leon, you were incredible.”

“Not incredible enough,” Leon huffs. _Not enough, not enough._ “I can’t even describe it. This feels like--like--”

“Like you’re suffocating?” Raihan finishes. “Like your world is crashing down?”

“No,” Leon replies, because neither of those sound quite right, and nothing he’s tried to come up with on his own has, either. “It’s like...there’s nothing to even compare it to, Raihan. Not everything feels like something else.” 

“Hm.” Raihan makes a noncommittal sound then crosses the room to pull back Leon’s curtains, let some natural light into the place. It’s both a blessing and a curse that Leon’s blackout shades are so effective, because it means he has no grasp on what time of day it is. When Raihan draws back the drapes, it’s evening, maybe an hour before twilight. The warm vibrance of day bleeds into a jewel-colored skyline while the sun dips below the edge of the horizon. Any other day Leon might find it beautiful, but for now it just makes him feel hollow. Raihan makes his way back to his place at the nightstand.

It’s too much. Leon shakes his head, purple tangles rustling over his shoulders. “I’m so lost.” _Lost, lost, lost. I lost._ “I don’t know how to lose. I don’t know how to be a loser.” He almost asks, _‘Do you think I’m a loser too?’_ but the question can’t crawl up the porcelain in his windpipe. If Raihan said _‘Yes,’_ that would be it. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself. “Guess I’m not such a worthy rival anymore.”

Raihan’s face doesn’t change. “Okay, answer me this. Am _I_ a loser?”

Leon’s reaction is instant. “What?! No way!”

Raihan leans forwards. “But I’ve never won against you. I’ve known you for what, fourteen years-- ” _Sixteen, actually._ “--and I’ve still never won against you, not even once.” Raihan folds his arms across his chest. “So if _I’m_ not a loser, then why are _you?”_

Leon searches for an answer, but nothing comes. Raihan continues. “Why do you hold yourself to such different standards than you do the rest of the world? Do you really have to be _that_ hard on yourself?”

Leon opens his mouth to protest. “I--”

But Raihan doesn’t let him finish. “You lost once, Lee. _Once._ Losing is part of my job description. If you still don’t think I’m a loser after all of that, then what the hell does that make you?”

It’s a while until Leon finds the strength to respond. “I don’t know what that makes me,” he says breathlessly, dragging his hands across his tired features. “I don’t know what I am at all. I was the man who’d never lost, and now that I have, I just feel like -- I don’t know, like there’s nothing special about me anymore.” He drops his eyes to the white sheets twisted at the edge of his bed. “I’m not the Champion, Raihan. I’m not anything. I couldn’t even protect Hop against that -- that _thing.”_

He’s not sure why he settled on _thing,_ when he should’ve gone with _beast_ or _demon_ or _monster._ Nothing else could describe that empty skeleton dripping noxious gobs of energy the color of a bruise, exposed _that-can’t-be-a-real-heart_ of pure energy drawing him in with the inescapable pull of a black hole. It wasn’t so much a Pokémon as it was a force of nature, unstoppable as the tides or the orbits of the planets -- until it wasn’t anymore. He really wishes Gloria hadn’t used Eternatus on her team, after she’d somehow managed to catch it. He’s never been one to back down from a challenge, but part of it just didn’t seem fair. “Raihan, he could’ve died. My baby brother could’ve died, and I couldn’t do a thing to protect--”

“That’s not what Hop told me.”

Leon blinks. “What?”

“Well, since you weren’t texting me back, I reached out to him,” Raihan explains. Leon still can’t believe the two of them are such good friends. Little traitor. “I wanted to know what went down when Rose tried to recreate the Darkest Day. Hop told me how right before Eternatus broke out of the Pokéball you threw at it, you sent Charizard back to protect him and Gloria, instead of yourself.” Raihan sets his jaw. _“Hop_ could’ve died? Leon, _you_ could’ve died. You really think it’s nothing, being so ready to sacrifice yourself like that?”

Leon gulps. When he puts it like that, it doesn’t _sound_ like nothing. And he’d been ready to die, too, when the Pokéball started breaking and he knew it wasn’t over. He thought he _was_ dying, for a minute there, when that blinding flash of light swallowed him into a tunnel, like he’d always heard about in movies. But he’d opened his eyes, and his face was in the dirt. He couldn’t even move. Eternatus was still in front of him, but _Gloria_ was, too.

In that moment, something deep inside him knew right then and there. She would be the one to finally defeat him. She would be the one to take it all away.

“She has no idea what she’s getting into,” Leon says under his breath, and Raihan doesn’t need to ask who he’s talking about. Sometimes being the Champion was a little like drowning, but at least he got used to the feeling of water in his lungs. Leon swallows thickly, and it’s all he can do to push past the shame lodged in his throat. “Raihan...I think I hate her.”

But Raihan just shakes his head, shadows and evening glow fighting for the space across his features. “Nah, you don’t hate her,” he murmurs. “You hate yourself.”

It should make him uncomfortable, having Raihan read him _that_ easily, _that_ quickly. Mortifying ordeal of being known, or something like that. They’ve always been close like this, though. A king and a prince, they were called. A dragon and his tamer. Leon hated that one.

But the discomfort doesn’t come. Instead, Leon just feels relieved.

“Yeah,” Leon exhales. “Yeah, I do.” It feels better to say it out loud, even if it hurts to hear. “So how do you not hate yourself?” He has to tilt up his chin to meet Raihan’s eyes. “How do you not hate yourself when you lose?”

Because it seems like Raihan’s never fazed by anything, even when Leon beats him for the thousandth time, always tossing back a tilted smile that’s all mischief and sharp teeth and a terse, _‘I’ll get you next time.’_ Leon has a signature smile like that, but only because he’s practiced it in the mirror every day for the last ten years.

“You think it’s easy?” Raihan asks.

“You make it look easy,” Leon says sheepishly.

“I make _everything_ look easy,” he says with a cocky grin so gorgeous it’d kill Leon if he wasn’t already dead inside. Then the expression falters, and Leon’s stomach does a flip. “It’s not easy, mate. It keeps me up at night sometimes, wondering what I could’ve done differently, what I could’ve done better, why I wasn’t enough. Sometimes it feels like the rift separating us is always growing, like no matter how far I’ve come you’ve somehow managed to go even further. What can I say? It’s not easy staring at your back all the time. I mean, come _on.”_ Raihan chuckles to himself, like he’s laughing at a joke only he knows the punchline to. “The first person to beat you wasn’t even _me._ I work my whole life at it, and some fourteen-year-old girl does it on the first try.”

Yeah, Leon can’t even begin to figure out how to respond to that. Actually, he thinks he might hate himself a little bit more now, and he didn’t think that was possible.

“Do you resent me?” Leon asks in a small voice.

“No,” Raihan replies, and the answer is too automatic to be anything but the truth. He says it with such sincerity that Leon doesn’t doubt it for even a moment, despite how hard he’s spiralling. “No one challenges me to become better like you do, Lee. Somehow, chasin’ your shadow has landed me in my own spotlight. Losing to you isn’t easy, but it’s gotten easier. Battling you makes life exciting. It’s like you said; there’s nothing I can even compare it to.”

“I feel the same way about you,” Leon blurts out. Whoops, wording. “I mean, there’s no way I’d be where I am today if you hadn’t been there for me. Without you constantly pushing me beyond my limits, my first loss would’ve happened a long time ago.”

“Oh yeah?” Raihan says with a chuckle. “Guess I shouldn’t have helped so much, then.”

Leon finds himself actually smiling at that. Raihan’s looking at him with warmth that spreads throughout his body, like Leon’s drinking liquid fire. Damn those eyes of his. Only the hottest part of a flame burns that shade of blue.

“Asshole.” Leon jabs him in the knee, but it’s playful. Raihan punches his arm in response, but somehow that’s playful too. “I guess I just...wanted to be perfect.”

Raihan tucks his hands behind his head. “Really? I wouldn’t wanna be perfect,” he declares. Too bad, Leon thinks he already is. “If there’s nothing about yourself that you want to change, what reason do you have to try to become better?”

The words strike Leon like a critical hit. It’s super effective. A one-hit KO. 

Leon doesn’t know what he wants to change. It makes him wonder what he’s been doing all this time. He’s been struggling so hard to stay afloat that he never considered what it might feel like to swim.

But there’s something else that he needs to know. “Raihan,” he begins. “What are you gonna do when you finally defeat me?”

 _“If,”_ Raihan corrects.

 _“When,”_ Leon counters, because it’ll happen someday, he knows it will. “I mean, it’s even written on your League Card that you could easily become Champion of another region if you left, but that beating me seems to be more important to you, and so you stay.” Something sinks in the pit of his stomach. “What will you do when you defeat me?” _Will you be done with me?_ “Will you leave?”

At first, Raihan says nothing. Then he’s crowding Leon’s space before he can even register it, putting his arms on either side of Leon where he’s sitting on the bed, and Leon thinks that if hearts could explode then his would burst into flames. 

Raihan is close. Almost too close. From this distance he can feel him breathing, the air hot against his skin.

“Not gonna leave,” he murmurs. “Gonna find a new dream.” 

“A new dream?” Leon whispers.

“Yeah, a new dream,” Raihan replies. He presses their foreheads together, his Trapinch beanie scrunching up against Leon’s messy bangs. “You just have to find a new dream too. And you don’t have to figure it out today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. All you gotta know is that you don’t have to figure it out alone. I’ll be here, okay? We can figure it out together.” He reaches down to take Leon’s hands in his, long slender fingers wrapping around Leon’s calloused own. “Listen to me. Champion is a hell of a lot more than just a title, but you’re a hell of a lot more than just a Champion.”

And that’s it. That’s all he needed to hear. That there’s a man behind the king, a boy behind the prodigy. A wave of tranquility washes over him, smooth and fluid. _This is the end,_ Leon thinks. _But it’s also the beginning._

“Thanks,” Leon whispers against him. “For everything.”

“‘Course,” Raihan replies. He cards a hand through Leon’s disheveled hair. “You wanna go for a walk or something?”

Still breathless, Leon can only nod. Raihan drags him out of bed and across his room’s threshold, into the elevator from his penthouse and down onto the streets below. It’s nighttime now; stars spill across the sky in wide, sweeping brushstrokes. The ambient light of the city mingles with the glow of the moon, illuminating the rooftops in grid-like squares as they stroll throughout the boulevards.

And Leon thinks absently that maybe Raihan is wrong, that Leon _is_ a loser, not in the sense that he’s an unworthy person but just that he’s a person who loses sometimes, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe he needs that to make him a little more _human_ and a little less _Champion,_ a little bit closer to finding a new dream to live for.

But he’s ready. He can do this. Maybe being a loser won’t be so bad after all. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks again for reading my fic! i hope you enjoyed it. it was certainly fun to write, even if it gave me some trouble towards the middle there. i’ve always sucked at organization.
> 
> comments and kudos always make my day! thanks again!


End file.
